Issues of Patriarchy in Asian Cultures

The purpose of this research is to examine issues surrounding the subject of patriarchy in Asian cultures. The plan of the research will be to set forth the sociological context in which patriarchal values appear to surface in such cultures, and then to discuss the implications of socially based sex roles that demonstrate patterns of male dominance on one hand, or outright misogyny on the other.

In recent years there appears to have been an increase of interest in the status and changeability of social roles of both men and women in all cultures. Research into socially determined sex roles of Asians both inside and outside Asia has been a part of this increase. By and large, research studies appear to indicate that traditional patterns of social behavior persist where sex roles are concerned.

Indeed, there is evidence that, despite certain shifts in the public perception of men and women in society, the establishment of conventional sex roles in Asian cultures begins almost from infancy and continues into old age. Sakata (1991) reports that Japanese two-year-olds acquire an embedded understanding of inflections and references in the Japanese language that designate traditional sex roles, and that they are sensitive to male or female "particles" in their speech patterns. Sex differences are so effectively "encoded" (p. 120) that male children are taught to use male particles by mothers, while females are taught to use female particles. According to Sakata, the encodi

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ile Durkheim's view that suttee is the Hindu version of ultimate altruism. Katzenstein (1989) chronicles feminist efforts in India to address the enormous problems of women's social position, chiefly through mass-media exposure of suttee incidents. But suttee continues in remote areas of India, along with a more general suppression of women by means of dowries, the culture of wife beating, and the like. According to Stein (1988), the social status of women in contemporary India is governed exclusively by marriage. Writing ten years after her first study, she specifically cites "the perils of daughterhood in India" (1988, p. 465), as well as the "tradition" of suttee. The analysis is backed up by press reports: The high court of the Indian state of Rajasthan has upheld the state's new[!] law banning suttee, the Hindu rite of widow-burning. The law was enacted on Oct. 1 after a public outcry over the Sept. 4 death of Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-old widow. She threw herself on her husband's funeral pyre in Rajasthan's Deorala village. The state law bans both suttee and glorification of the widow-burning practice by building temples to victims . . . widow-burning is banned by federal law, but occurs from time to time in remot

Category: Foreign - I